​BBC documentary 'Bitter Lake' is 'too dangerous' for TV

Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist.
Over the last 20 years he has been exposing the secret power of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and élite Bilderberg Conferences where the dark forces of corporations, media, banks and royalty conspire to accumulate wealth and power through extortion and war.
Tony has spent much of his life too advocating solutions which heal the wealth divide, such as free housing for all and a press which reflects the concerns of ordinary people rather than attempting to lead opinion, sensationalise or dumb-down.
Tony tweets at @TonyGosling. Tune in to his Friday politics show at BCfm.

Adam Curtis’ latest documentary, ‘Bitter Lake,' examines the 'special relationship’ between the US and Saudi Arabia which has grown to dominate the Middle East.

Gliding effortlessly
alongside that is the rise of radical Islam, Afghanistan, and the
petrodollar energy markets that now overshadow international
relations.

Against a sumptuous backdrop of dream-like archive footage and
haunting music, we revisit the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, where prices
quadrupled. We don't find ‘bolshy Arabs’ throwing their weight
around as the myth still runs in the West. Instead, OPEC's price
rise is to punish the US for its massive military shipments to
Israel during that year’s Yom Kippur War, as Arab countries tried
to take back territory which had been occupied by Israel in 1967.

Afghanistan & Saudi Arabia at the crossroads

Bitter Lake’s release comes just three days after the death of
Saudi King Abdulla on Thursday, January 22. The official
announcement came so late on Thursday that Friday bulletins on
BBC Radio 4 and BBC 5 Live mistakenly announced the hapless
monarch as dying that day. Most English language mainstream
media, including Wikipedia, still incorrectly state that King
Abdulla died on Friday.

Why does this matter? Well, it shows just how fragile the Saudi
monarchy is. These mistakes tell a story about the battles for
succession that can take place in ponderous tyrannies. All the
succession ceremonies were carried out in secret and the new King
Salman was crowned, all signed sealed and delivered, well before
the death was announced to the public.

Modern Saudi Arabia is a British colonialist creation forged at
the Treaty of Darin in 1915. Indeed, much of the Middle East was
secretly carved up around the same time by Laurence of Arabia and
London's Foreign Office and the French government in the
hush-hush 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.

The 'Bitter Lake' of the title is the venue of an 'oil for
protection' meeting between US President Franklin Roosevelt and
King Saud in 1945. As the only nuclear armed power in the world
at the time, almost entirely undamaged from the Second World War
that had raged around them, the United States of February 1945
was in a good position to offer global protection. Though neither
may have understood it at the time, their agreement contained a
fundamental contradiction – that Saud's Islam and Roosevelt's
capitalism were, and are, on a moral and spiritual collision
course.

Fast forward to Afghanistan today. Though a sheaf of dubious
'security' and 'construction' contractors are always left behind
these days, the last British and American troops left
Afghanistan's key Helmand province only three months ago in
October 2014. So, after tens of thousands of deaths, what exactly
has NATO achieved?

With NATO's, to borrow Dan Glazebrook's phrase, 'Divide and Ruin'
foreign policy turning everything it touches in Iraq, Pakistan,
Libya, and Syria to blood and gore, we now have – at least partly
– NATO armed and funded ISIS appearing on the scene in
Afghanistan too. It seems about time we all took stock of the
religious and military powder keg that NATO and Israel have
created.

As not seen on BBC television

Though commentators have made much of Curtis only releasing the film online, on the BBC
iPlayer, they fail to explain that's because the BBC’s television
channels did not commission it – and online did. That decision is
the commissioning editor's. In the cult of television, could it
simply be that the vicious truth is okay for kids – what, with
all those wacky YouTube videos – but too much for the masses?

After losing direction somewhat with his 2011 film 'All Watched
Over by Machines of Loving Grace,' Curtis has slipped
effortlessly back to the peak of the craft with Bitter Lake; his
tender touch showing once again that filmmakers CAN love their
audience, that British film and television CAN be the best in the
world. The way this film stands out gently begs the question,
through every one of the 140 minutes, why has the rest gone to
hell in a handbasket?

What happened to great feature filmmakers like Peter Greenaway,
Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Terry Gilliam? The simple answer is, like
the disabled, sick, and elderly, the money-men are chocking them
off. The delicate eco-system which distilled out and nurtured the
nation’s most gifted filmmakers through the likes of John
Grierson, through Powell and Pressburger to Attenborough, has
been boxed in, concreted over, and overrun by thugs and pliable
wannabes.

With a brilliant script and a begging bowl, talent now can be
struggling for years, only to get a little development money if
lucky. It just isn’t worth the candle. This most challenging and
youngest of crafts – invented only around the turn of the 20th
century, in the space of 20 years – and a perverted 'war on
terror' has been brought to its knees.

A light in the darkness

Every one of Adam Curtis’ previous epic BBC documentaries has
done precisely what journalism and television should always do –
takes us on a journey in the safe hands of someone who's on our
side. Rather than use his access to the corridors of power for
his own gain, Curtis takes us behind the curtain to see the
shadow play behind some of the most subtle and profound changes
of the last century.

Interlacing all his work are forceful, defiant notions. For
example, that voting might be something people only do now with a
kind of ‘blind faith’ that perhaps things might not change so
much for the worse if they do it. In bypassing the politics of
left and right, we might even come away with the notion that the
democracy the rest of the media holds such stock by is, perish
the thought, just a sham.

In 1999, Curtis' ‘The Mayfair Set’ shone a light into the tiny
group of Conservative party businessmen and politicians – such as
Trade and Industry Secretary Sir Keith Joseph – who drove the
hostile takeover and asset stripping culture of the 1980s.
Fiercely touted as 'good business sense' at the time, they
stripped Britain of its industrial, foreign exchange earnings –
often for their own private gain – right under the noses of the
nation destroying both Britain's trade and her industry!

'The Century of the Self' in 2002 looked at the Freud family's
curious influence on psychoanalysis, a sort of replacement for
religious faith, and the effect of Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward
Bernays, who invented propaganda. Then, after its wartime use by
Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels, Bernays re-branded his invention
as the cosy public relations we know so well today. In Curtis'
subtext is the horrifying thought that perhaps the relentless
economic drivers behind today's tax-deductible PR have left
traditional journalism and journalists dead on the vine.

The Power of Nightmares (2004) was, along with Dylan Avery’s
‘Loose Change’ (2005), one of a handful of post 9/11
documentaries which, like Allan Francovich’s 1992 films about
Lockerbie and NATO's pernicious Operation Gladio, boldly turned
the official narrative on its head. 'Nightmares' investigates the
use of fear to manipulate mass populations in the post 9/11 world
and the effect of policies which are based on nightmare visions
of the world peddled by power elite whose vision they want to
project is moving ever further from reality.

In it he gives us important insight into the back story of the
West’s influence in Egypt and the post-war rise of the Muslim
Brotherhood while looking also at the live TV terror
spectacular’s ability to terrorize and soften up the minds of
millions of viewers, at the ability of a handful of powerful
people in elite institutions – such as finance and media – to
engineer human consciousness on a global scale.

Fighting the thought
police

Today’s broadcasting executives are being drafted in straight
from the Temple of Mammon; from the Conservative party, big
business, or – as Barclay’s Marcus Agius and new HSBC chair Rona
Fairhead – at the BBC, banking. Not only do these institutions of
debt suck the soul out of our arts and culture, but both have,
over the last few years, been behind history’s most obscene
examples of fraud and money laundering.

Perhaps the unpunished crimes hanging around these executives’
necks helps explain the odd characters they choose to deploy as
commissioning editors and in higher and middle management? People
like Newsnight editor Peter Rippon, who spiked the biggest story
of 2012 because he didn’t want to spoil a ‘Jimmy Savile Christmas
Special.' That, and the executives’ decision not to discipline
him but to put him in charge of the BBC archives, speaks volumes
about the sarin gas inspired characters running our nation’s
nervous system.

The world our children are inheriting is profoundly different to
the one we grew up in. So much of what we see and hear is an
account framed not by independent producers and journalists, but
by paid spin doctors and vested interests. A heroic handful of
documentary makers have brought the craft through Naomi Klein's
'Shock Doctrine' deceptions of the 9/11 attacks and into the 21st
century, so not all is lies and confusion in the last days of
Rome.

Adam Curtis has once again smashed acres of soulless schedules,
decades of half-truths, and billions of pounds worth of lies to
pieces with this splendid documentary. Let’s pray it’s not his
last.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.